


Dragonfire

by glorious_spoon



Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Astral Projection, Dragons, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Presumed Dead
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-08
Updated: 2020-05-08
Packaged: 2021-03-02 17:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24080515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glorious_spoon/pseuds/glorious_spoon
Summary: "You're dead," Ward says. "You don't get to be pissed off at me."Or: Danny is gone, and Ward isn't really coping that well.
Relationships: Ward Meachum & Danny Rand
Comments: 22
Kudos: 45
Collections: Id Pro Quo 2020





	Dragonfire

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



> A treat fic for **Sholio** , for the prompt _A thinks B is a hallucination but B is actually stuck on another plane and needs saving_.

When Ward wakes from a restless and unsettled sleep to see Danny sitting cross-legged in the corner of his tent, looking tired and battered and more than a little annoyed, he swallows down something that feels jagged and says, “Oh, _fuck_ off,” before turning his face to the pillow.

“Ward,” Danny (not Danny) says insistently. “Ward, what the hell, come on.”

There’s an irritated edge to his voice that borders on whiny. He sounds exactly the way he did a week ago when Ward locked him out of their room by accident, or for that matter twenty years ago when he was a snot-nosed brat who got offended when Ward wouldn’t share his comic book collection.

Ward squeezes his eyes shut. They’re burning like there should be tears there, but nothing comes.

“ _Ward_ ,” Danny says again, closer now, insistent. Ward opens his eyes without consciously making the decision to do so. Danny is leaning over him with a furrow between his brows. He looks—he looks like Danny. Unbroken, whole and healthy and alive _._ And annoyed, but mildly so, as if he’s just pissed about Ward being a dick instead of—

His hand lifts, and Ward watches with a fascination like a rabbit watching a hawk’s descent as it comes down as if to jog his shoulder, then keeps going. His fingers pass through Ward’s shirt and the flesh beneath without any resistance at all.

Danny pulls back, looking shocked, and Ward says, nastily, “Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you’re dead, asshole,” and pulls the sleeping bag over his head.

There’s no response, and he wasn’t expecting one. When he ducks his head out again, the tent is empty, which of course it was all along.

Turns out, he still had a few tears left after all.

* * *

The trip down the mountainside is slower than it would be if Danny were with him. He doesn’t meet anyone on the trail, which is a mixed blessing; the last thing he wants right now is to be forced to make small talk, but the silence leaves him with too much time to think. He seems to have lost the knack of avoidance sometime over the past year. No matter how hard he tries to fence off the part of his mind that remembers Danny disappearing in a sheet of flame, he keeps returning to it. Danny’s shocked face, the way he flung one hand out, and then the blistering heat that roared over him and burnt the world to ash.

“Ward, seriously,” Danny says, and Ward stumbles to a halt, nearly overbalancing with the heavy pack strapped to his back, squeezes his eyes shut. Doesn’t turn. It was bad enough last night, when he was more than half asleep and everything had the dreamy, hazy unreality of 3 AM. If he looks over and sees Danny in the bright sunlight amidst bursts of small hardy flowers scattered across the slope, he’s going to have to accept that his grip on reality is actually slipping for real.

He firmly quashes the part of him that thinks that might be a good thing. He didn’t lose his mind after twelve years of Harold’s bullshit; he’s not going to lose it now. “Go away.”

“No,” Danny retorts irritably. “Would you just look at me for a second?”

“No, I will not look at you, because you’re not _fucking_ real.”

“Right, then who are you talking to right now?”

“A figment of my imagination,” Ward snaps, and starts walking again. He’s not going to cry, not now. He needs to keep it together at least until he gets down to the base camp, where there’ll be a phone he can use. The sat phone was in Danny’s pocket, but Ward needs to call Colleen, a prospect that his mind shies away from every time he tries to think of what to say. Colleen, and Misty, and Joy, and Danny’s ever-expanding collection of superhero friends…

Jesus. There are so many people who love Danny, he’s going to have to set up a fucking phone tree to notify them all.

“You’re really starting to piss me off here,” Danny says. There’s no sound of footsteps, but he doesn’t sound any farther away.

“You’re dead. You don’t get to be pissed off at me.”

“That’s funny, because I definitely am.” Ward jolts to a stop as Danny suddenly steps in front of him, feet braced, arms folded, glaring. His face seems to be shadowed oddly, as if the sunlight isn’t quite hitting him. Which of course it isn’t, because he isn’t there. Ward could walk right through him, if the idea of it didn’t make him want to vomit. “I’m not dead, okay?”

“I saw you die,” Ward bites out.

“I don’t know what you saw, but—”

“I saw you go up in flames, and I spent hours digging through the ashes to see if I could at least find your goddamn body, so don’t act like—” he breaks off. The awareness that Danny is dead, really _dead_ , that he’s alone on this sun-soaked hillside and arguing with a conjuring of his own grief, is suddenly too much to take. He swipes at Danny with one hand. It passes through his chest, and Danny looks down, frowning, but doesn’t disappear. Ward slumps, then sits down abruptly on a rock, all the anger seeping out of him and leaving only a cold, hollow ache behind. “Please just leave me alone.”

Danny does no such thing, of course, because Ward can’t imagine him doing it, even now. He crouches down in front of Ward, looking concerned, and starts to reach out before pulling his hand back. “What happened to your hands?”

Ward looks down at his messily bandaged palms. He’s actually pretty decent at basic first aid—courtesy of Harold—but bandaging your own hands when they’re both burnt and blistered turns out to be a real pain in the ass. He doesn’t answer.

“Sorry,” Danny sighs. And then, “I’m not dead. Honestly. Come on, your imagination isn’t this good.”

“No, but stress-induced psychosis might be,” Ward mumbles before he remembers that he wasn’t going to talk to his hallucination anymore. He grinds the heel of his hand against his forehead. It hurts, but when he opens his eyes again Danny is still there.

“It wasn’t a fire,” he says.

“I was _there._ ”

“Yeah, but it wasn’t—okay, yeah, there was a fire, but that’s not what happened to me _,_ okay?” Danny shuffles closer. “Ward.”

Ward sighs, feeling something small but important snap inside him _._ He looks up, finally, and meets Danny’s eyes. He looks—tired, actually, and a little singed. There are streaks of soot in his hair and on his shirt, and a bruise blackening the side of his face that wasn’t there the last time Ward saw him.

“The cave—”

“The dragon cave,” Ward interjects tiredly.

“Yeah, it was a mistranslation, I think. I mean— _you_ didn’t see an actual dragon, did you?” Danny continues before he can answer. “It meant something more like—step through the dragon’s fire and find the treasure you seek. We assumed it wasn’t literal, but—”

“But you’re telling me that...what, it was a portal to another dimension?”

Danny shrugs, offering him a wry, hopeful kind of smile that’s just so _Danny_ that it hurts. “Is that really so hard to believe? With our lives?”

“And so this is all just—” Ward waves his bandaged hand at Danny’s ghostly shape. This close, he actually does seem slightly transparent, unfitting, like a badly-done bit of CGI. Like he’s been pasted into the reality that Ward occupies. “What? Because you’re definitely not really here.”

“Astral projection. I think. I think I’m…” Danny trails off. “I think I’m injured. I didn’t even realize— last night, I followed you to the camp, I thought you just… I don’t know, left without me for some reason. I’m cold, though. And I can’t really feel anything.”

“Injured,” Ward repeats, then stands.

“Yeah, I—what are you doing?”

“Hedging on the possibility that I’m not actually crazy and you’re not actually a ghost,” Ward retorts as he starts back up the hillside. It took him most of a day to make it down this far, but he wasn’t moving fast. He can make better time. If he pushes it, he might actually make it back up to the cave by nightfall.

“Yeah, but do you have a clue what you’re doing?”

“Nope,” Ward says shortly, lengthening his stride. He’ll figure it out as he goes. If he actually is crazy, it won’t matter anyway.

* * *

Sunset is stretching long fingers down the mountainside and drawing deep shadows in its wake by the time he finally makes it back up to the cave. His thighs and back are burning and his tongue feels heavy in his mouth, his lungs aching and sore. The air is thinner this high up, amidst the bare stone and stunted trees and endless wind, but Ward is pretty sure that isn’t the only reason.

Danny has vanished as soundlessly as he appeared, sometime during that last relentless half-mile when Ward wasn’t looking. Ward is aware of what that might mean. Of all the things it could mean, few of them good.

He’s acutely aware of the possibility—the likelihood, even—that this is just a fool’s errand he’s on, and has been since the beginning.

The cave entrance is hollow and dark, all bare scorched stone. There were flowers growing around the entrance when they first found it; now they’re just smears of ash coating the figure of a dragon etched deep into the stone. It’s rough and blocky, stylized, not anything like the intricate art that he’s seen from K’un Lun. This looks like something far older. Primal.

“Wow,” Danny says from behind him, and Ward flinches. Danny comes up soundlessly alongside him, surveying the scorched wreckage. There’s still a vague heat emanating from it, though it’s been more than a day since Ward dug sobbing through the ashes like he might find Danny breathing underneath them. “Okay, yeah, that looks bad.”

“You _think_?” Ward snaps. He flexes his aching hands, then unstraps his pack and sets it down before approaching. Danny keeps pace with him, a shade in the red sunset. His feet make no sound as he walks, and he seems… less substantial somehow than he did this afternoon. Translucent, like the light is starting to come through him.

“Yeah, I—” Danny breaks off. When Ward glances back toward him this time, he wavers like a heat wave, and then vanishes.

An awful feeling crawls up the back of Ward’s throat, something bleak and sickened, and he isn’t thinking at all when he strides forward and slams his burned and battered hand against the dragon, the way Danny did yesterday before he was consumed by flame.

He should be terrified, and he is, but in that moment his worst fear isn’t fire, it’s that nothing at all will happen, that the cave will stay dark and empty and he’ll have to camp in this awful place for another night without even ghosts or hallucinations to keep him company. And for a horrible moment, _nothing_ is exactly what happens. The stone is cool and lifeless; the cave is empty. Ward swallows hard and starts to step back.

A wall of heat slams through him like he just walked into a blast furnace. It sears his skin and sucks the moisture from his eyes and he thinks, _oh, this was a really stupid way to die_ —

And then he’s stumbling into a hot and stuffy darkness. Small flames lick at the air, then subside. There’s no sign of the cave entrance, or the mountain behind him; the blackness is absolute.

At least until something shifts before him, a pair of vast glowing eyes opening up like lanterns from several yards over his head. Light flares from every corner of the room, illuminating—

Okay, yeah. That’s a dragon.

That is an… absolutely fucking enormous dragon, red-gold and scaly and at least two stories tall. It has a long, sinuous neck and wings that seem to scrape the ceiling of this vast space, and teeth that are probably longer than Ward is tall, and for a moment every scrap of exhaustion and grief and even fear has fled and all he can do is stare.

There’s a breath of air that smells like scorched metal, and then the enormous head ducks down, and a voice like a landslide says, “ _Another one? What an eventful few days this has been._ ”

“Um,” Ward manages. He has no idea how one is supposed to address a dragon, especially with the distinct possibility that he’ll be swallowed whole or burnt to a crisp if he gets it wrong. Danny _fought_ one of these things?

Danny. That thought steadies him, a little. He clears his throat. “I’m—very sorry to intrude. I’m looking for my brother—”

“ _Hm._ ” The vast bulk shifts, sliding scales a waterfall of metal. It’s too big for him to keep the whole thing in his field of vision at once, too big to be _real_. There’s gold scattered across the floor, ancient coins in strange shapes and glittering gems. “ _Here is where all precious things can be found._ ”

“I don’t want anything precious, I just want to know if you’ve seen my brother. Daniel Rand. Is he here,” Ward says through clenched teeth. The golden, glowing eyes blink slowly, and he forces himself to add, “Please.”

Another shift of gleaming scales and wings that would be oversized on a jet plane, and then the dragon says, “ _You’re welcome to look._ ”

“Thanks a lot,” Ward mutters, then shuts his mouth before he gets himself eaten.

The cave—if that’s what it is—is vast, and apparently filled corner to corner with what Ward can only assume is a dragon’s hoard, because that’s apparently his life right now. The dragon itself settles on a mound of gold, massive claws scraping the stone floor and head cocked as it watches Ward pick his way through the piles of silks and statues and gold and...junk. Dragons are apparently not all that discriminating, nor does this one seem to have anything resembling an organizational system—

Wait.

There’s a crumpled figure in denim and checkered flannel collapsed on the floor on top of a mound of moth-eaten silk. Ward scrambles across the shifting piles of coins toward him, completely disregarding the foot—paw—whatever that moves past his head with claws that could slice him in half.

Danny is pale and unmoving. The bruise from earlier looks worse somehow like this, and Ward falls to his knees beside him, fumbling numbly for his throat with fingers that are shaking so hard that it takes several seconds before he can feel the slow, steady beat of his pulse.

He breathes out a curse that feels more like a prayer, then looks up as a scaly head the size of an SUV leans over him. “Look, I don’t know how all this works, but I just want to get him home. Okay? If I have to make a deal with you, or something—”

“ _I find these dramatics tiresome_ ,” the dragon rumbles, and Ward could swear he can hear something like humor in that vast and echoing voice.

Before he can think of a way to respond to that, there’s another breath of flame, scorching his skin and turning the world to shades of red and orange. He curls around Danny and squeezes his eyes shut, hoping that they’re not about to be reduced to cinders.

He opens them when cool, rain-scented air hits his face.

They’re outside, and night has almost completely fallen, the last hints of sunset glowing in the western horizon. There’s a chilly rain misting down, soaking through his shirt and making Danny twitch and mumble in his lap. He squeezes his eyes shut, then opens them, staring up at Ward with a dazed and bleary look.

“Ward?” he mumbles. “Th’... what th’hell happened?”

Ward opens his mouth to say something utterly cutting, but somehow the words tangle in the back of his throat and the next thing he knows he’s hauling Danny into a clumsy hug, burying his face in Danny’s warm shoulder and breathing in the smell of stale sweat and scorched hair, and—

Not crying. Much.

One of Danny’s hands finds its way to his back, patting awkwardly before settling against his shoulder blade. He sounds slightly more with it when he says, “Okay, seriously, what happened?”

“You touched something you shouldn’t have,” Ward says into his shirt. “Moron.”

“Yeah, but…” there’s a movement as Danny shakes his head, his damp curly hair brushing against Ward’s cheek, but he doesn’t make any effort to pull away. “I think I had… a really weird dream. Was there… was there a dragon?”

“ _Yeah_ , there was a fucking dragon,” Ward says, and makes himself pull away, swiping at his face. He could probably blame it all on the rain, but Danny is giving him a knowing look that makes him suspect that won’t really work. Beyond him is the cave entrance, or rather, what should be the cave entrance. Now it’s just a blank stone face with small pale flowers scattered across the base. No sign of the dragon engraving, or of the scorch marks, or of anything else to suggest what was there a few minutes ago. He clears his throat. “You still have the sat phone, right?”

“I… think so?” Danny says, clearly derailed. He shifts, digging in his pockets, then comes up with the phone and hands it to Ward. “Why?”

“Because you need medical attention and I’m not about to hike down in the dark and risk both of us ending up with broken necks after all this,” Ward says, and feels Danny start to laugh shakily into his shoulder. “Shut up, I hate you.”

“No, you don’t,” Danny says, tucking himself closer. Ward snorts into his wet and smelly hair, but he doesn’t shove him off as he opens the phone and starts to dial.


End file.
